3 most important campaign aspects to spend your marketing budget on
As an artist, your yearly marketing campaign will have a huge influence on the level of success you are able to achieve. With a marketing campaign, a budget also needs to be allocated to ensure that each segment of the campaign flows smoothly as the year progresses. Without a budget plan, individuals and organizations have the capability to accidentally deplete their entire budget within the first few months of the year. Your marketing budget will completely depend on where you are at in your career and the resources you have available. Even if your budget is relatively small, it is still vitally important to allocate this budget efficiently to distribute it across the year’s campaigns. But which aspects of your marketing campaign should you dedicate the most budget to?
The world of marketing is undergoing a monumental shift, with online campaigns becoming more valuable than ever before. As an electronic music artist, you will find that the majority of your campaigns will be suited to the online environment, and more traditional methods won’t suit your image. The positive of using online methods is that the ability to measure the response is much easier, and you can shift your campaigning as a result. Unlike traditional television adverts that could never really measure the true result of their campaigns, online advertising usually reveals a whole host of analytics, exposing exactly how successful or unsuccessful your adverts were. Online advertising also enables you to analyze exactly which demographic responded well to your advertising, enabling you to better target your content in future. If you find that the majority of those engaging with your content are aged between 20-30, you may want to target that age group specifically when promoting social media posts. You may also find that specific countries around the world respond well to your advertising while others do not. Online advertising is all about trial and error, learning from your mistakes and fine-tuning your presence.
Targeted content
It is imperative to target a high volume of your budget towards creating high-quality targeted content. One of the most valuable aspects of your marketing campaign is the content that connects with your audience and provokes engagement, as it is one of the leading influences in the growth of your platforms. Without engaging content, your marketing campaign is essentially useless, as people will have no motivation to buy into your brand. Think about what your audience would want to read/see and cater to these needs. You may want to dedicate some of your budget to paid promotional posts on social media, building your presence through attracting new profile visitors. Even a small budget spend on social media advertising can have a great impact on your reach, and can make the difference between your posts being successful or unsuccessful. Even with promotional posts, it is important not to sell yourself too overtly. Find the balance between selling and engaging your audience in order to generate the most success. When allocating a budget to this specific aspect of your campaign, focus on keyword research, building your strategy, and potentially hiring writers and designers if you are unable to create the content yourself.
Email marketing
Another aspect of your marketing campaign that you should dedicate sufficient budget to is your email marketing campaigns. Although it may be time-consuming, developing a mailing list will be highly beneficial for your brand, and will enable you to reach out to those who are most likely to interact with your content. Sending weekly emails to this list will enable you to generate even more interest around any news items or new projects. Putting together emails on a weekly basis can be time-consuming, so you may want to hire somebody externally to take care of this for you. Aside from writing the emails, the other aspects of email marketing that you may want to set aside a budget for are dividing your audience into useful segments, and using software like MailChimp in order to really allow your promotional emails to shine.
SEO
A large chunk of your marketing budget should also be dedicated to your website’s SEO (if you have your own website). If you are not familiar with SEO, optimizing your site can seem daunting, but with some thorough research, you will soon learn how to manipulate your search engine ranking. If you don’t have the time to research SEO and adapt your site, you may want to hire an individual to handle this externally, or if you have a larger budget, you may even want to hire an SEO agency to take on the task. Analysing your competitors’ sites and researching specific keywords is vital but can be highly time-consuming. Evaluate the resources and time you have to dedicate to SEO before making a decision regarding whether to complete the research yourself. You may want to handle SEO yourself to begin with, and hire an external agency further down the line.
Deciding where to allocate your marketing budget is never easy and can provoke a whole host of questions around which aspects of your campaign are the most important. One of the most vital things to remember is that you should always be sure to spread your budget throughout the year in order to avoid running out of money within a few months. As long as you distribute your budget evenly throughout the months and focus on the key aspects that drive the most engagement, your brand will feel the benefits. In order to really expand your reach, focus on these three aspects and watch your brand truly thrive as a result.